Items disappearing from shopping cart

A couple of customers told me that they put items in their shopping carts and the items disappear before they can check out. How do I fix this?

Find out what browser the customers are using.

Hi. I am having the same problem with items disappearing from some but not all of my customers shopping carts. I believe it does have something to do with which browser you use.

If I attempt to add items to the shopping cart using the drop down menu to get to my categories, it always works fine, all the items stay in the shopping cart, regardless of which browser I use. HOWEVER, if I attempt to go back to shopping and use the custom links I had made on the left-hand side of my webpage that link to each category, and THEN try to add more items to the shopping cart, all of the previous items will disappear when using Internet Explorer version 7, or sometimes in version 6, though in version 6 the effect is not consistent (using 1 computer it always works fine, using another it doesn't work, might have something to do with which sub-version of IE 6 it is?). IF in these problem versions I use the drop down menu at the top the shopping cart works fine though. The shopping cart seems to always work fine in Mozilla, though I don't have that many versions on it. I have tried this on 4 computers using 3 versions of IE 6, 1 version of IE 7, and 3 versions of Mozilla.

My store is at https://www.elixirbotanicals.com if anyone would like to try this for themselves. Does anyone have a work-around for this, or should I just remove the custom links to the categories on the left side of the page? I would like to try and find a way to keep them since I feel they are an intergral part of the design, but I don't want to discourage my customers and I am worried about posting some giant explaination about this issue on the front page.

Thank you very much for any ideas or input!

Have you tried getting rid of the FRAMES that you are using?

Zen Cart is not made for FRAMES ...

Also, it would appear you are calling the categories in a different manner and you may be losing the zenid on the session ...

Open a new browser session ...

Point, DO NOT CLICK, on one of the cats on the left ... note there isn't a zenid ...

Point, DO NOT CLICK, on another link such as your TAB menu ... NOTE: these will show only the immediate categories_id and not the path but you do see the zenid on the first click ...

NOTE: none of your products have a default attribute selected and you will get a lot of incorrect orders ...

One method is to add another Option Value such as:
Select One
Pick One
What do you Want?
etc. etc. etc.

Make it Display Only and Default ...

This will force both that the customer to make a real choice and prevent a wrong choice from accidentally being made ...

I have had a similar problem. Zencart used to keep a customers items in the shopping cart before checking out. So for example they can log back in days or even weeks later and resume their shopping and the cart remembered everything they place in it before. Not it seems to dump the shopping cart when logging out. Does anyone know how to fix this? I want to to remember the items in the shopping cart even after logging out as it has done for over a year before.

J.D.

crawlina ... see your other post on this one ... best to keep things separated ... :smile:

Apologies for opening an old thread but today I have been made aware of this exact same error - that is items being placed in the shopping cart then disappearing. Only one customer has reported this fact but co-incidentally we have been monitoring orders placed using who's online and we have often noticed shopping carts being 'loaded up' then next refresh shows several items being removed. We just thought it was the customers changing their minds but now it seem that something is not right with the site.

Today's customer was using IE7. We have tried to replicate the problem (we are using macs so our browsers are firefox) but we have yet to see this problem ourselves. We need all the sales we can get so if anybody has any ideas what may be causing this anomaly then please post.

Out of interest our site cannot be accessed without manual authorisation (all products and side boxes are hidden), however there are no drop down menus on our site, just the side box cats as standard. the only thing we have done is to add additional cats for alternative ways to find our products (craft sheets). For example we have a category for a product by type then the product is copied into another category called, say Christmas. Same product, just copied from main cat and accessible two ways. Hope this makes sense.

Rob

Have you an URL to your site where we can perhaps try to break things for you? :smile:

Hi and thanks

www dot g18 dot biz / order

you will need to quickly register as the site is a trade only site and 'hidden' from public.

Alternatively I will PM you a test login.

Rob

What it looks like to me could be the customer getting lost on the new windows for the PDF files ... the session relationship could become broken and losing things in the cart so they have to go rebuild their cart content ...

No guarantee that is the problem but things that lose the session or step outside shop environment can result in these occurances ...

In something like FireFox, where you have multiple tabs, you can have a situation where you login and add things to the cart then get lost on one of the other pages so you go to login again and depending on what you were doing between windows, things again can be lost in the session as now you have two open sessions with mixed results ...

See if you find this happening and if you see any interaction with these other windows being opened or if people report this to you, maybe you can ask a few more pointed questions as to what they were doing and ask about 1 or more windows being open or having to login again etc.

Hi

Thanks for that. Makes sense. Perhaps I should offer these downloads as free items (keeping within the shopping environment). Would this solve that particular issue do you think - or at least narrow things down a little? Mind you the original window with the items in the shopping cart remains open!

PS do you want to buy any craft sheets??? LOL.

Rob

OK an update.

When the customer logged back into his account to complete his order the shopping cart had suddenly replensished all those items that had disappeared earlier (logged off with 10 items in shopping cart, logged back witht 15 items in the shopping cart). Does this help at all in solving things?

Not wishing to complicate matters further but we also have the 'recover cart' mod installed and according to this log in admin there are a further 4 items - so now I am dead confused. Coffee time me thinks!

Rob

Let's say I have bookmarked your site ...

I login with window 1 and add to my cart ...

I later get lost and login with window 2 ... in theory, things should be the same but if I am working with 2 sessions, things can get mixed up between the two sessions and possibly lose items from the cart ...

Making the downloads free items does help ... or making them links to downloads that do not open new windows would help ...

NOTE: All this is guessing at the moment as the issue is intermittent and cannot be reproduced on a click by click situation ... but avoiding things that might cause problems would help ...

Thanks again.

I will monitor and try to narrow down things to see if I can isolate the prblem.

Rob